


Of Seasickness and Dead Eyes

by RubyDragon



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2540183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RubyDragon/pseuds/RubyDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xephos finally gets what he wanted. Here he is, floating through space towards what was once his home. He's been working to reach the heavens since he crashed into Minecraftia. But if that's so, why does he feel as empty as the void around him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Seasickness and Dead Eyes

Xephos stared into the sky from his tiny window, and yawned. Sky stretched in every direction. Black, and deep, like the impenetrable darkness of a lifeless, cold lake. It spread around him, a spiraling galaxy, an endless starry arm enveloping him and his ship. In front of him was this sky. Above him was this sky. Below him. All around him. He was suspended in the wallless cavern by some unknown force, drifting along. 

 

The slow, rumbling purr of his ship, his jail, his home, was his only company. It echoed around him. It was an empty, hollow purr. An occasional beep or two would come from the life-support systems, but always at the same pitch. Sometimes he would see orange out of the corner of his eye, brash and bright amongst the monotonous gray and silver of the ship’s interior. He would turn only to see the same button, flashing on and off, on and off. It fooled him every time. 

 

When he felt lonely, he would stare out the window, into the stars. Endless torches, endless eyes - many already dead - but all still watching him. While it brought him peace, the flash of orange would persist, blinking on and off, always just in the corner of his eye. He would bring himself closer to the single, tiny, window, pressing his nose against the cold glass. He would take both of his long, gaunt hands and hold them around the sides of his face so that all he could see were the stars and the darkness.

 

When it came time to eat, he would open the ship’s storage compartment, grabbing one of the bags of dehydrated carrot or potato from beside the endless jars of chillies. He was a fool to have wasted so much space for the chillies. They were impractical. The stark red itself brought upon impractical feelings. Just like the orange light. He’d have to get rid of them sometime… Sometime.

 

While retrieving a meal, the box wedged in the lowest shelf of the storage compartment would nag at him from just beyond his view. He knew very well what was in it. Archaic clothing from another world. A long, red coat. A blue striped shirt. Boots and brown pants, worn and loved. Atop them would lay an old diamond sword, chipped and dull. Its hilt’s leather fixings were torn and shined from years of sweaty-palmed combat.

 

He didn’t want to open the box.

 

That place was behind him now.

 

 

 

 

He remembers when he first crash-landed on the planet in his twisted metal cocoon. Honeydew was the first one to find him. He remembers the unease that coursed through his body when he’d first met Honeydew. It brought back memories of his grandfather, laying dead in his bed, eyes devoid of their healthy green light. His mother had ushered him out of the room, gently prodding his vision away from the dead man. To walk with unlit eyes was to walk with a corpse’s visage.

 

When they were forced to take refuge in that tiny shack beneath a tree, the darkness was impenetrable. The light of his own eyes barely even reached the walls of the cramped, wooden shack. But Honeydew’s eyes didn’t glow. He couldn’t see the man in the room with him, yet he could feel the alien’s presence burning into his side. The only clue of the other man’s presence was the strong smell of dirt and powdered, wet stone.

 

His heart pounded in his ears through that night, sweat gathered around his body, flooding every pore. The dwarf’s presence unnerved him to no end. The dead-eyed man spoke another language altogether, quick and rough. His translator was incapable of deciphering this language; it was unknown and strange in structure. Xephos could only pick up one word through that whole night, which the stranger repeated incessantly.

 

“Friend,” Called the shadow beside him.

 

“Friend,” Xephos would repeat back, as if to appease the dead-eyed man.

 

It was only several months later, Honeydew and he happened upon a traveling scientist named Lalna. Lalna’s eyes didn’t glow either. It was at this point that Xephos began to wonder if he was in some sort of afterlife; he began to wonder whether he had died in that crash, and this was his resting place. The masses of undead seemed to support the theory in a way. But then it wouldn’t make sense that his own eyes still carried their life, and that there were separately undead beasts and the spirits of his comrades. Or maybe, that was just how it worked here.

 

Maybe he was in some sort of heaven. Maybe his heaven was a place where he could explore in this seemingly endless world. Maybe…

 

Of course, his linguistic skills were still limited. Confirming anything would be difficult.

 

“Friend,” Xephos began, sitting down on a creaky chest, “Why your eye dead?”

 

Honeydew stopped sharpening his pick, looking up questioningly at Xephos, “What?”

 

Xephos tried his hardest to explain, stumbling his way over the strange vowels and consonants, his mouth growing tired quickly from the strange movements it had to preform, “Your eye,” he pointed at his own eye, “not like the sun. Is…” He paused, trying to remember the word he needed, “Is dark. Your eye is dark.”

 

Honeydew paused for a moment, mumbling Xephos’ words back to himself. Then he burst into a hearty roar of a laugh, holding his belly and wiping a tear from his eye.

 

While the dwarf was swollen and pink with amusement, Xephos’ lanky limbs pulled in towards his body, knees facing each other, face burning with embarrassment. Honeydew noticed this a bit too late, and stopped his laughter, still smiling brightly.

 

“Sorry friend, just explains a lot is all,” He said, standing up, “I’ve been wondering myself why your eyes glow like that. Haven’t seen anything like it since I mined me first sapphire.” Another hearty laugh erupted from him.

 

Xephos was completely alienated by Honeydew’s quick speech, and found himself even more confused.

 

“Saf-ire? Wund-oreing? Gl-owe?”

 

Honeydew pulled an apologetic look, scratching his large, ginger beard absentmindedly, “Your eyes,” Honeydew said slowly, “are like the sun. Your eyes _glow_.” Honeydew made a motion with his hands as if something was spraying out of his eyes. “I have not seen eyes glow before.” He paused for a moment, looking up as Xephos’ focused expression, “Eyes do not glow here. All eyes are dark.”

 

After a moment digesting the dwarf’s sentences, Xephos simply replied, “Dead?”

 

Honeydew sighed, a faint smile on his lips, “No.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Xephos suddenly felt very, very foolish.

 

However, this revelation hardly made this world feel any less dead. He was stuck on the ground, buried, suffocating. He hated the caves the most, although Honeydew seemed to love them. The world seemed so dark. On his planet every nook was filled with light. Every corner and alley was lit up with electrical brilliance, trees along pathways were genetically engineered to glow, and of course, the eyes burned like stars.

 

Occasionally he would watch the scientist work with a careful eye. The level of technology being used on this planet was so archaic it baffled him. For a long time, the most complex mechanism he saw was Lalna’s use of a strange red dust to create automatic doors or gilded clocks or sharp, crude musical notes emitted at mechanical intervals along a line of blocks. Back home one could fit an entire orchestra which composed new songs as it played on something the size of a mitochondria. Back home the lights knew when to turn on and the doors knew when to open, the clocks were digital and concise, the plants grew quickly and more plentifully. He remembers the shock he first felt when he saw his friends using _coal_. They were cooking with _coal_. They made energy and light and heat and relied on _coal_. It burned his lungs, he was spoiled by a perfectly regulated atmosphere and fusion reactors.

 

And yet he felt so stupid and useless. His clean, unscarred hands weren’t meant for this world. Honeydew’s short, square hand was perpetually dirty, his nails either caked with dirt or missing entirely. Lalna’s careful, average fingers, although usually dressed in thick, black leather gloves, were painted with burns, both acidic and fire-based. One of his pinkies didn’t bend properly either. He said it’d been broken one too many times.

 

Xephos simply didn’t understand how people could live like this. How they could go a single day living in such environments, in such conditions. He could feel himself slipping at times, a pent up, horrible gasp of sorrow in his throat, an immovable lump. The mood swings were unpredictable. He didn’t know what would set him off. Sometimes it would be the labour of gathering wood. Other times he would feel the hopeless, temporarily endless sorrow when the smoke of the furnace caused him to cough in uncontrollable fits. But then there came the time he gained his first scar. That was when the tears broke out.

 

It was an arrow from a skeleton, straight to the stomach. On his planet the greatest injuries he’d ever sustained were scraped knees and paper-cuts. Neither of those could have prepared him for this. 

 

The pain broke him down instantly. He went to his knees and fell to his side. The nanobots in his bloodstream began to heal the wound instantly, imbedding the arrow into his abdomen, knitting it to his flesh. Lalna was to his side in an instant, grabbing Xephos while Honeydew cleaved the skeleton with his diamond pick, shattering the skull into dust, hardly noticing as he had two arrows shot into his right shoulder.

 

Lalna had a difficult time removing the arrow. The cuts he made with his scalpel would be healed just as fast as he made them. His only choice was to grasp the arrow and force it out so that Xephos’ nanobots couldn’t envelop it once again. The skin healed quickly on its own, a little white line being all that was left. He could remember staring at that small imperfection night after night, vaguely illuminated my the blue of his eyes, and silently crying over it, knowing that this world had changed him.

 

 

 

 

It was the same scar he stared at now, floating in the endless silence of his little pod. Whenever he changed his clothes it was there. It glared at him. It taunted him. Even when he couldn’t see it he could feel it, boring into him, as if it was alive. He could still smell the wet, powdered stone, still see the flashing orange light out of the corner of this eye. He still ate the chilies, still carried the too-heavy diamond sword in his cargo bay. He still hummed tunes from a now distant planet, half expecting someone to hum back.

 

Though he once dreamt of home, that distant planet beyond the atmosphere of what was his prison, he now dreamt of owls and bright red rings hovering in the heavens. He dreamt of green goggles and explosions far away. He dreamt of dirt and wild, careless nature, the feeling of building a new home out of the earth and stone. 

 

He sat, cradled a ship which had been born from the result of years of love and struggle by Lalna and himself, although Lalna was long gone. As was Honeydew. And Lomadia… He knew he was heading home. Instead he felt as though he’d been wretched away from his own heart.

 

He still cried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
